Yep. A simple bypass of that check gets us building right:
gsed -i 's:test "x$cairo_cc_stderr" != "x":false:' configures
What's the reasoning behind checking stderr? Perhaps there is a better way to achieve those ends...

I just want to say that this bug makes it impossible to build on osx with 10.4u SDK because ld always gives a warning about an object compiled with -mlong-branch which is no longer needed. Configure really needs to ignore these warnings. Editing configure as mentioned fixes the problem.